Category: Science

Visit from a dirty snowball

The skies this weekend were mostly clear after sunset, with just a few clouds at the west horizon. Those clouds were perfectly positioned to hide Comet Tsuchinshan-ATLAS, currently visiting our neighborhood, and I couldn’t see it, even though Venus and Arcturus were perfectly visible. Last night the sky was completely clear, and I finally could set up the tripod and get a few pictures. These were taken 45 minutes to an hour after sunset.

Tsuchinshan-ATLAS is no Hale-Bopp. It was barely visible to my bespectacled eye as a faint smudge, and I would not have noticed it if I hadn’t known where to look. In a place far from city lights someone with sharp eyes might possibly spot it, but most people will need binoculars or telescopes to see it.

The comet is halfway between Venus (lower left) and Arcturus (right)

Right-click and open the images in a new window to see them at maximum size.

October skies and heavy weather

NASA Astronaut Matthew Dominick: “Comet rises up over the horizon just before orbital sunrise with aurora streaking by.”

When the weather is clear, you have a good chance of seeing a bright, possibly naked-eye comet this month.

Update (10/11/24): Where to look. Some hints for finding it.

*****

Weather websites such as Weather Underground (a distasteful name for a useful site) extensively cover Atlantic hurricanes but rarely notice when anything happens elsewhere on the planet. I find Zoom Earth helpful to track storms around the world, such as Typhoon Krathon, which is currently inundating Taiwan.

Looking down

I don’t have the proper filters for directly photographing the sun, so I pointed the camera down during today’s eclipse to record the crescent suns on the pavement.

Today’s quote

Silicon Graybeard:

… go outside on a clear, dark night. Wait until your eyes are used to the dark and look up. Everything you see that is shining by its own light is nuclear powered. Everything you see shining in reflected sunlight (the moon, the planets), all of that is lit by nuclear power. Now look toward your house or a nearby city. Everything you see is lit by chemical bonds being broken and re-established. As someone put it, “everything God powers is nuclear; everything man powers is fire.”

See Astronomy Photo of the Day for numerous examples of nuclear lighting.

Morning gloom

The skies here are heavily overcast, and there is no sign of the annular eclipse going on right now other than it being slightly darker outdoors than earlier this morning.

I was luckier six years ago.

Dark times ahead

There will be an annular solar eclipse October 14, a week from Saturday. That will be followed by a total eclipse next year on April 8. The paths of both eclipses cross the USA, intersecting in south Texas not far from San Antonio. Here in Kansas I should have a pretty good view of both, assuming the weather is cooperative.

NASA has maps of the paths at various resolutions that you can download here.

Hot stuff up north

The Reykjanes peninsula in southwest Iceland was quiet for 800 years, but it’s awake now. The third eruption there in as many years has begun. I’m suspending my “no YouTube” rule this once to post this video of the eruption’s beginning. For more information, check the recent posts and comments at Volcano Café.

Update: See also here.

Update IIb: This eruption is over, but there’ll be more soon.

Update III: The Greatest Show on Earth:

Unlucky Thirteen

I’ve uploaded some interactive panoramas from the Cosmosphere in Hutchinson. The one above shows the command module “Odyssey” from the “successful failure” Apollo 13, flown in April 1970. You can see the rest of the additions here (click on the “recent” tab). They are best viewed in full-screen mode.